One Kindle launcher to rule them

Ask around and chances are you can find a friend or family member that still has their early generation Kindle but doesn’t use it anymore. There are quite a number of different things you can do with them, and now there’s a single Launcher that works for all models of hacked Kindles. KUAL is the Kindle Unified Application Launcher.

Loading the launcher on your device does require that it be Jailbroken/Rooted, but that’s really the entire point, right? Once on your device the system is easy to configure. Menus themselves can be customized by editing the XML and JSON pair for each list. The screenshot on the left illustrates some of the applications you might want to run. We could see a VNC viewer being useful, and everyone likes to have games — like Doom II or the entire Z-machine library — on hand when they unexpectedly get stuck somewhere. But MPlayer? Does anyone actually use their ePaper device to watch videos?

16 thoughts on “One Kindle launcher to rule them”

Yes, people DO watch videos on their eink Kindles. There is a unified video player that works on all kindles from the Kindle DX through the latest Paperwhite kindle. It actually plays the videos surprisingly smoothly on a Kindle 3 or newer, but it only plays silent films for now:http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=177455

And you can play streaming videos too, by piping internet content through mplayer to the geekmaster video transcoder to the geekmaster video player…

mplayer is used here to support development of a forthcoming “Procedural Audio Wallpaper “project. it’s not required but a nice to have. So “No”, not for video.

A properly dithered video render target for Xephyr (and it’s audio enabled FB alternative) may well be just around the corner enabling end users much easier access to streaming with reliable results on all devices. All the parts exist, they just need throwing into the right piles. As Geekmaster indicates video can be streamed with audio if you know exactly what to strap where. He should know he wrote that ;)

In fact developers can indeed do many things now with the kindle that you might expect from a small handheld computer. End users still have the occasional learning gulf to cross. It’s a matter of time, will, coffee, understanding and inventiveness to make this stuff people friendly.

We got this far. It can be done. Lot’s to come. Thanks again from the whole team

While we are at it: does anyone knows how to remove the ads from the new kindle (the cheapest, 69 version)? I found many articles dating 11/12 of 2011, but amazon seems to have fixed that “issue”. Many thanks.

Removing those ads is something that shouldn’t be done, at least until Amazon kills support for those specific devices. They’re helping pay for the difference in price between the “normal” version and the “special offers” version. Besides, if it was that much of an issue, you should have paid the extra $30.

I don’t get it – why would you no longer use an old-generation Kindle to read ebooks? These aren’t like tablets; their primary purpose has changed very little in time. Sure, now the screens update faster and require less black fills, but beyond that there’s little difference (paperwhite excepted, I guess). Put a new battery in and away you go.